How can technology help overcome inequality in education?

Introduction

One of the most drastic changes that this generation of students has experienced is the digitalization of classrooms. It's amazing to think that the form of the classroom has not changed for years, but right now it's undergoing a transformation gradually. Such a transformation was accelerated during the Covid years as students and instructors were forced to take the class online. Although now, three years after the pandemic, the campus is back to in-person again, we could not go back to the way it was before Covid. The online format of teaching seems to have become an integral part of the modern education system. Now, access to a stable internet has become essential for students to receive an education (at least it is the case here at Johns Hopkins), potentially exacerbating the inequality in education. Therefore, we thought it'd be valuable to analyze the historical data on technology and education to evaluate the correlation between them.

How has internet become a essential infrastructure in the world

In the early stages of the internet, accessibility was not as widely available. However, with technological developments, this access has become more widespread. Similarly, access to mobile cellular subscriptions has become more widely available. We wanted to initially assess the relationship between each country's GDP and the percentage of the population with access to the internet as well as the number of mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 people for 2000, 2018, and 2020 to assess trends when internet connections were not as necessary, before Covid, and during Covid.

In the 2000s, access to the internet was not as much of as a necessity as it is in more recent years and we see a stronger correlation between the country's GDP and the percentage of the population with access to the internet and the number of mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 people. This correlation weakens in 2018 and 2020, where a country's GDP is not as strong of an indicator of how much of the population has access to internet or cellular subscriptions. Overall, more people have access to these resources as the years have progressed and it has become prevalent in our lives.

In the maps below, countries that are colored in black may not have data available for that statistic.

Not the same level of improvement in accessibility to education

Some may argue that one of the benefits of the internet was that it has facilitated increased access to education. Traditionally, education has only been accessible to those enrolled in educational institutions, and only at certain times of the day and certain days of the week. With the advent of streaming videos on the internet, educational websites, like Khan Academy, have started to become household names. Besides Khan Academy, there are an enormous number of educational channels available on YouTube that teach anything from calculus to cooking. Nowadays, anyone with a sufficiently strong internet connection can learn from wherever they are and at any time without paying or enrolling in an educational institution. Despite this seemingly high availability to education via the internet, there are still some places in the world where a significant portion of primary-school-aged children are out of school as shown in the graph below, and there a number of possible causes for this problem. For one, children out of school may not have access to internet and technology to be able to learn at their convenience. Secondly, children do not generally have the discipline to sit and learn by themselves and require assistance from a teacher. This implies that, even with the internet, school is and will likely be the primary method of education for children all over the world.

Direct comparison between the two variables

Having looked at the accessibility to technology and to education separately, we thought it'd be more straightforward to put the two variables together. The graphs below represent people in different world regions' access to the internet and education in 2000 and 2020. We'd thought that since the tech sector and education have had more overlaps in recent years, the two variables would show a higher correlation in 2020. However, what the graphs have shown is that they had a higher correlation in 2000.

Perhaps it's clearer if we can play with the data a little bit. The y-axis of the two graphs below is the percentage of people with access to the internet. If we sort the bar by ascending order of percentage of enrollment, we can see that in 2000, the order of is very similar to the ascending order of accessibility to the internet. If we look at the graph in 2020, we do not see that much of a difference in the y-axis value of the bars if we sort it in the order of percentage of enrollment. It is rational when one thinks about the fact that the internet has transformed from a luxury good to a near necessity in just two decades, while education has not changed so much. Thus, in 2000, only people with higher incomes can have access to the internet and education. In 2020, the Internet has become more available to people with lower incomes, but people in poverty still rarely can receive an education.

Can the widespread usage of the internet helps promote access to education?

What has become clear from the data analysis is that there is only a weak relationship between accessibility to technology and education, at least a weaker one than we have thought of. It may be because the more recent open-source data is from 2020, the year when Covid started. If we have data that are more recent, we might see a strengthening in the relationship between them. Nevertheless, one thing worth thinking of is how we can exploit the widespread usage of the internet to promote education. In other words, how can the advance in technology help in providing high-quality, low-cost education to people around the world? We can see such an idea being carried out in higher education. For example, the Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals program offers online and part-time master’s degrees and certificates in 22 programs spanning multiple engineering disciplines and applied science. The program may not necessarily be low-cost, but it aims to provide a high-quality online learning experience. It'd worthwhile to explore ways the technology can help not only in universities but also in primary & secondary schools, especially schools in the third-world countries.

Ways to strengthen the impact of tech on education

Due to the possible consequences of technology use in classrooms, schools must take caution in how technology is integrated into lessons. Students can finish assignments, watch the latest sports matches, and message their friends all while sitting in lecture. In this way, technology distracts students from focusing on what is important. Furthermore, technology allows students to multi-task, which does more harm than good by inhibiting focus on one particular task. In order to benefit from technology, educators have been adapting their courses and teaching style to use technology in ways that facilitate learning. For example, many educators have adopted a flipped classroom format -- this means students learn at home via videos and come to class to solve problems. This is beneficial to students because they get exposure to the subject at their convenience and build a better understanding by solving problems while getting immediate feedback from their instructor. According to results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) from 2018, students with access to a computer they can use for schoolwork report higher scores in mathematics compared to students without access. The difference in average scores between having access to a computer that can be used for schoolwork and not having access is shown in the Y-axis of the scatterplot below. The X-axis indicates an index of computer usage (negative values do not indicate negative usage). The scatterplot shows that the difference in test scores from access to computers is increases with computer usage, but seems to decrease after a certain point. This suggests too much computer usage could be detrimental to education.

Conclusion & analysis

With the increase in access to the internet in the past two decades, this has become almost a necessity instead of a luxury. There has been a weakening correlation between a country's GDP and the percentage of people with access to internet as well as number of mobile cellular subscriptions. There has also been an increase in quality educational resources available online, although the increased prevalence of these resources has not necessarily resulted in an increase in access to education. While more people in varying economic statuses have access to the internet, people with lower incomes still have decreased access to education.

Given the technologies developed during the pandemic to support online education, there are also opportunities to use these developments to increase access to education. These were initially developed to increase access to education when traditional, in person, forms were not as accessible. Despite the return to both in person and hybrid forms of education, we can continue to use these and it is promising to see the potential of applications of these technologies to increase accessibility to education regardless of economic status.

We acknowledge the fact that there are several factors that contribute to accessibility to education, but we can leverage the increase in access to internet and technology to help increase access to quality education.

References

Individuals using the internet (country & time) - % of population https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?view=map
Mobile cellular subscription - per 100 people https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS?view=map
Fixed broadband subscription - per 100 people https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.BBND?view=map
Children out of school https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.PRM.UNER
Share of children lagging behind in attaining foundational skills https://data.unicef.org/resources/are-children-really-learning-foundational-skills-report/
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/new-global-data-reveal-education-technologys-impact-on-learning, Dataset used: https://pisadataexplorer.oecd.org/ide/idepisa/
Map tutorials/resources: https://observablehq.com/@d3/world-map-svg, https://www.npmjs.com/package/world-atlas
https://ourworldindata.org/primary-and-secondary-education